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Little Boxes

LIKE many New Yorkers, I groaned when the Kmart went up in Astor Place in 1996. Although I've been known to celebrate Target's underwear supply, and I bought my fax machine at Best Buy, I find nothing more overwhelming than browsing in a big-box store, with its booming pop music, jaundiced fluorescent lights and mind-numbingly endless aisles of products.

So I have been surprised to find myself among the many New Yorkers converging on the Container Store, at 19th Street and the Avenue of the Americas in Chelsea, not just for the shopping, but for its restorative effect. At the Container Store's 25,000-square-foot beachhead, devotees wander past the 70-foot-long wall of coat hangers in shades of peach and lime, past honeycombs of diamond-shaped sock organizers and Lucite shoeboxes in every color of the rainbow, suffused with a feeling of tranquillity.

The Container Store is dedicated to the proposition that there is a place for everything sprawling and untidy, and that that place is probably made of Lucite and probably stackable. It has become such a familiar part of the shopping landscape that many of us can no longer remember where we bought coat hangers and milk crates before the store opened.

Even those who secretly wonder just how many filing cabinets and in-boxes one person can possibly buy have been known to embrace this particular place. As if in a trance, they dreamily push their overflowing carts and smile as beatifically as Stepford wives as they make their way down aisles wide enough to accommodate the twin strollers that have become the hallmark of latter-life procreators. Track lights shine their heavenly beams on the portable canvas closets, the stacking totes, the Tupperware and the galvanized metal storage cubes, all in soothing earth tones of khaki and moss and pewter.

"It's all possibilities in there," explained Raina Moore, a 34-year-old children's book editor who lives in a 425-square-foot apartment in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and has a particular fondness for closet organizing supplies. She often makes weekly trips to the Container Store, whether or not she needs a new rattan gift box.

The place gives Ms. Moore the illusion of power, tantalizingly holding out the idea that the chaos of her life, not to mention the clutter found in the typical 500-square-foot apartment, can be brought under control. "Everything in there is a solution," Ms. Moore said. "As soon as you walk in, you just feel like your problems are solvable."

There are thousands of tiny projects that can be finished with just a little help from these storage gurus. The moment I put the cat food in the purple plastic bucket with the spinning lid, I have achieved my goal. I'm relaxed just thinking about it.

Some Container Store disciples don't even actually buy the stuff. So soothing is the place, they simply roam among its smorgasbord of items, fantasizing about the perfect compartmentalized closet, the perfectly organized spice rack.

"You walk in, and you just feel this immediate sense of calm," says Cris Beam, a 33-year-old writer and avid Container Store browser, who lives in a 500-square foot apartment with her partner in Morningside Heights. During times of high stress, Ms. Beam has been known to frequent the Container Store several times a week; for her, even wandering the aisles empty-handed is enough to melt away the anxiety.

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Of course, there's something else going on. We New Yorkers, with our shoebox-sized apartments, our lack of garages and basements and attics, are the perfect audience for this particular chain store.

While organizational products have been available for years at Container Store competitors like Hold Everything, that store is relatively small, and caters largely to a more upscale clientele. Bed, Bath & Beyond is the opposite: filled with clutter that only compounds a sense of imminent chaos. "You go into Bed, Bath & Beyond," Ms. Moore said, "and you're already having to move things around to fit that new thing that you're buying."

The Container Store, by contrast, follows a very calculated strategy. It offers just the right number of options -- enough to appeal to a variety of social classes (coat hangers range from 29 cents for the classic plastic tubular hanger to $19.99 for a cedar suit hanger), but not so many that you feel as if you've stepped into a vertical flea market. The chain has also made a conscious decision not to diversify: You won't find hand lotion and gum at the cash register.

The Container Store, which began in 1978 with a single outpost in Texas selling industrial storage products that had previously been available only wholesale, now has 34 outlets. The New York store, though only 18 months old, is the chain's most profitable; it did $24 million worth of business last year ($9 million in shelving alone), which is three times as much as the average Container Store.

Full-time employees -- a group that includes everyone from college students and grandparents to aspiring actors and disillusioned lawyers -- undergo 241 hours of training in their first year, and learn to ask all sorts of probing questions about your problems so they can use the cross-training that has been drilled into them. Yes, that garbage bin could double as a laundry basket. That laundry basket could work as a dog bed. The Lucite storage bins can be used for holding winter clothes or seasoning a turkey (and customers have bought them for both purposes).

One customer came in search of a way to divide her mother's ashes among three sisters (a clerk presented her with four small tin paint cans and four silk-covered gift boxes in which to put them). Another woman needed a box in which she could lock up her food; she was afraid that her boyfriend was going to poison her. Even in issues truly involving life and death, the Container Store can offer at least a temporary solution.

URBAN TACTICS Lisa Selin Davis's first novel, "Belly," will be published this month by Little Brown.

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A version of this article appears in print on July 10, 2005, on Page 14014003 of the National edition with the headline: URBAN TACTICS; Little Boxes. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe